On twitter [or otherwise]

As occasionally happens, I’ve been reevaluating my relationships with social media. The last time I did this I received emails asking whether I was dead, so let me assure you that such rumours are greatly exaggerated.

Long time readers will remember that I joined twitter about a billion years ago as ‘iamleeg’, a name with a convoluted history that I won’t bore you with but that made people think that I was called Ian. So I changed to secboffin, as I had held the job title Security Boffin through a number of employers. After about nine months in which I didn’t interact with twitter at all, I deleted my account: hence people checking I wasn’t dead.

This time, here’s a heads up: I don’t use twitter any more, but it definitely uses me. When I decided I didn’t want a facebook account any longer, I just stopped using it, then deactivated my account. Done. For some reason when I stop using my twitter account, I sneak back in later, probably for the Skinnerian pleasure of seeing the likes and RTs for posts about new articles here. Then come the asinine replies and tepid takes, and eventually I’m sinking serious time into being meaningless on Twitter.

I’d like to take back my meaninglessness for myself, thank you very much. This digital Maoism which encourages me, and others like me, to engage with the system with only the reward of more engagement, is not for me any more.

And let me make an aside here on federation and digital sharecropping. Yes, the current system is not to my favour, and yes, it would be possible to make one I would find more favourable. I actually have an account on one of the Free Software microblogging things, but mindlessly wasting time there is no better than mindlessly wasting time on Twitter. And besides, they don’t have twoptwips.

The ideal of the fediverse is flawed, anyway. The technology used on the instance I have an account is by and large blocked from syncing with a section of the fediverse that uses a different technology, because some sites that allow content that is welcome in one nation’s culture and forbidden in another nation’s culture also use that technology, even though the site of which I am a member doesn’t include that content. Such blanket bans are not how federation is supposed to work, but are how it does work because actually building n! individual relationships is hard, particularly when you work to the flawed assumption that n should be everyone.

And let’s not pretend that I’m somehow “taking back control” of my information by only publishing here. This domain is effectively rented from the registry on my behalf by an agent, the VPS that the blog runs on is rented, the network access is rented…very little of the moving parts here are “mine”. Such would be true if this were a blog hosted on Blogger, or Medium, or Twitter, and it’s true here, too.

Anyway, enough about the hollow promises of the fediverse. The point is, while I’m paying for it, you can see my posts here. You can see feeds of the posts here. You can write comments. You can write me emails.

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